


Shattered City

by SeaSpectre160



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Gen, Halifax Explosion 100th Anniversary, Inspired by Real Events, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2019-02-11 09:32:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12932454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeaSpectre160/pseuds/SeaSpectre160
Summary: The Legends find themselves in the middle of one of the deadliest accidents in Canadian history.





	Shattered City

**Author's Note:**

> The Halifax Explosion occurred one hundred years ago today, on Thursday, December 6th, 1917 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. A French munitions ship, the Mont-Blanc, entered the Halifax Harbour to join a convoy of military ships in the Bedford Basin, which can only be accessed through the harbour (by sea, anyway). At the same time, a Norwegian ship called the Imo was leaving to pick up some war relief supplies from New York before taking it to Belgium. Due to some serious confusion arising from both ships trying to sail on the same side of the narrowest part of the harbour, the two crashed, and a fire started on the Mont-Blanc. At 9:04 am, the ship, which was carrying over 2,500 tons of explosive material, blew up. The ship was reduced to fragments that scattered across Halifax and the neighbouring city of Dartmouth across the harbour, whole buildings were flattened by the shockwave, and it is estimated that 1,951 people were killed, either by the explosion itself or the fires that started afterwards or from being trapped in wreckage during the blizzard that struck the next day or from the small tsunami that hit a nearby Mi’kmaq (the local First Nations) community. It is considered to be the largest man-made explosion before the invention of the A-Bomb.
> 
> DISCLAIMER: I don’t own ‘Legends of Tomorrow’. I also took the title of this fic from a real-life book: ‘Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion and the Road to Recovery’ by Janet F. Kitz. There’s also a two-part TV miniseries called ‘Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion’, but it has been criticised for being historically inaccurate, so I would NOT recommend watching it if you really want to learn more. Oh, and Duncan and his sister are also not really my characters, either; they are from the historical fiction story ‘No Safe Harbour: The Halifax Explosion Diary of Charlotte Blackburn’ by Julie Lawson (see below).

_Thursday, December 6 th, 1917_

“This should just be a normal mission,” Sara told her crew, “We go in, we put the Anachronism back, and we get out. As difficult as it’s going to be with this one, we have to stay focused.”

It had been difficult enough finding this Anachronism – at first glance, it was just a piece of wood. But Gideon insisted that it did not belong in a back alley of New Delhi 2020. She analysed it and declared that it was, in fact, a piece of a small tourist attraction of sorts.

The wooden window frame had once been part of a building that was destroyed by a massive explosion in Halifax in 1917, and was lodged in the wall of a nearby church. The Legends would have to travel to Halifax on the day of the explosion and plant the debris into the wall themselves. This would mean making their way through the devastated city and trying not to interfere with the rescue efforts. And by ‘interfere’, that meant ‘no saving people who are supposed to die’. It would certainly be a painful challenge for most of them.

Landing in a post-Explosion Halifax was not an easy feat. The Citadel was large enough, sure, but with a munitions ship exploding and people hysterical about German saboteurs and U-Boats (theories that would later be dismissed as nothing more than understandable panic), the military presence in the city would certainly react exceptionally poorly to the _Waverider_ coming down out of the sky. So they parked the _Waverider_ far away, northwest of the disaster site, and footed it inside, joining the rush of civilian volunteers from further inland.

It didn’t help that they had to cut through the North End of the city, which had been hit the hardest, even though the church they were heading for was in the South End.

Ray was the first one to crack. Buildings were burning, people were screaming, and rescue efforts were going on all around them. He spotted a woman trying to escape her burning house and helped the rescue crew pull her out. Amaya split off not long after, finding a man who’d been impaled by flying debris, but he wasn’t so lucky; she held his hand as he finally died.

As it stood, it took them an hour to reach St. Paul’s church, wooden debris in hand. Luckily, no one was inside – yet – but it would no doubt be flooded with people in a short amount of time. According to Gideon, it would soon be converted into a temporary hospital. Amaya channeled the Ashe of some kind of bird and carried Nate up to the proper spot in the ceiling, and the historian used his super-strength to plant the window frame in place according to a few reference pictures provided by Gideon.

Their mission technically done, the Legends couldn’t help but get sucked into relief efforts on their way back to the ship. They tried to focus on helping those who weren’t in mortal danger, but sometimes someone would scream for help and they couldn’t resist coming to the rescue.

Amaya slipped into a collapsed house when she heard a baby crying, and found the toddler under an ashpan, protected from the wreckage of her home. Her mother and brother were not as lucky, having already been killed by the time the Legends arrived.

Jax had a little child come up to him and cling to him, wailing for her mommy and daddy. It took a great deal of convincing to get her to go with a nearby soldier.

Nate found a man stumbling around in a daze with blood streaming down his face and a piece of metal lodged in his shoulder. The man, overcome with shock, hadn’t even noticed until Nate pointed it out, at which point the man passed out and collapsed.

Sara found a young girl running around in her bare feet, screaming for her brother. “Duncan! My brother, he was going to watch the fire! Have you seen him?! DUNCAN!” The poor thing collapsed in her arms, tears streaming down her blood- and soot-streaked face.

Stein did his best to help a little boy whose eyes were filled with glass – he’d been looking at the fire on the harbour through a window when the _Mont-Blanc_ had exploded.

Even Mick was pulled into helping lift a heavy piece of a house frame so that a mother and her child could crawl out.

Ray found a young boy, no older than thirteen, unconscious with half his left leg missing. He flagged down a soldier, who just looked at him and declared that nothing could be done to save him.

It was a tired, sooty, and haunted group of Legends that finally made it back to the _Waverider_. They’d seen a lot of horrible things perpetrated by the violence of war, but never had they seen so much death and devastation caused by an _accident_.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sara said hollowly, “We’ve done all we can.”

No one called her out on the fact that they could do so much more to help. It was easily the greatest burden of time-travel; to see so much pain and suffering and _let_ it happen, anyway.

 

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> ‘Ashpan Annie’ was a real-life Explosion survivor, only she was rescued 26 hours later in real life, and survived thanks to the ashpan shielding her from debris and its still-warm ashes keeping her from succumbing to hypothermia. She died in 2010 at the age of 94.
> 
> My own great-grandfather was another survivor. He was 12 years old at the time, lost his left leg from the knee down, and was actually mistaken for dead until he woke up in one of the makeshift morgues in the middle of the night. Luckily, the soldiers guarding it heard him crying, found him, and had him taken to the hospital. The theory of his survival is that whatever took his leg off was also hot enough to cauterise the injury and prevent him from bleeding out. My family still lives within a day’s drive from Halifax, and I used to routinely take the bridge over the Narrows while attending university there. I have also gone and seen the embedded debris at St. Paul’s church.
> 
> Now, as for ‘No Safe Harbour’, it is part of the ‘Dear Canada’ series of books, each of which focus on different events in Canadian history through the eyes of a fictional young girl experiencing them, written in a diary format. I own a copy of this Halifax Explosion diary and a copy of the Acadian Expulsion diary, as I’m of Acadian descent on my father’s side. ‘No Safe Harbour’ is from the point of view of Charlotte Blackburn, the youngest of a family of seven living in Halifax during the Explosion. I find myself crying every time I read it as Charlotte tries to process what is happening to her. Particularly jarring is the difference between two parts of her December 6th entry. One section is written in the morning before she goes downstairs for breakfast, and she is describing what she hears her family doing downstairs, and ends with this (directly quoting the book here): ‘Well, now things are quiet. Not a sound from Duncan - he must be eating his breakfast. I better get my porridge before he takes all the cream. Then it’s time for the milk run and smile, smile, smile!’ (that last bit quotes a song her father was whistling). The next goes like this: ‘I’m in a hospital, in a corridor, sitting on the floor. What happened? How did I get here? The corridor is jammed with people. Some covered with blood and black grime. Some with faces that don’t look like faces. Others rushing around, too busy to answer questions. Someone is screaming but most of the people are quiet. There’s blood all over the floor. The smell...’ She then goes on to mention vague memories of seeing dead bodies - some of them in pieces - and wondering why her father hasn’t come for her.
> 
> The Fic Image, if you care to look, features three pictures. The main one is of the cloud of smoke, either from the explosion or the fire that caused it (I’m not sure, but I think it’s the latter). In the bottom-right corner, you’ll see the headline of the Halifax Herald proclaiming the disaster. And in the top-right corner, you’ll find an image of the very same window frame embedded in an interior wall at St. Paul’s with a commemorative plaque beneath it. That third picture is one that I took myself (the other two I got from Google Images, and originally I was going to get the picture of the debris from there, as well, but then I figured: ‘Hey, I actually have my own pic of the debris, why not use that?’).
> 
> If you want to learn more, check out the [Halifax Explosion Infosheet](https://maritimemuseum.novascotia.ca/fr/what-see-do/halifax-explosion/halifax-explosion-infosheet) on the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic website.


End file.
